Nokia 6630

Discontinued
14th June 2004

The chubby-cheeked Nokia 6630 represents a serious attempt by Nokia to develop a mainstream 3G phone, and it certainly comes with some very attractive features.

Firstly, Nokia's philosophy is that the 6630 should be equally at home on 2G and 3G networks, and to this end the 6630 supports WCDMA (3G) data, plus GPRS and EDGE on GSM. EDGE is still pretty rare on handsets, but it allows data speeds approaching that of 3G running on a standard 2.5G GSM network. So it doesn't matter if you're a 3G customer or not, or wherever you might roam with your phone, the 6630 will be able to work pretty much anywhere.

Secondly, Nokia have tried to keep the size and weight down, and the 6630 is roughly the size and weight of the Nokia 6600/6620. We wouldn't expect it to be as small as a GSM phone, but it's still slightly heavier than the LG U8110, and is substantially larger and more weighty than the newly announced Motorola C975. However, this is still an impressive piece of work by  Nokia.

And thirdly, the 6630 packs a 1.2 megapixel camera. Nokia claim that this is the most advanced camera phone on the market, however we think that the Sharp GX30 will still beat it on optical quality. But, with 6X digital zoom, up to one hour of  video capture and wireless printing to compatible printers and other features, it's certainly amongst the best. There's appears to be no video calling facility as standard though, a weakness inherited from the Nokia 7600.

Finally, the Nokia 6630 (like its cousin the 6600) comes with strong media playback capabilities, including MP3 and RealOne formats. Removable MMC memory cards make it easy to swap audio and video files and other data, plus the phone has 74Mb of  internal memory to play with.

In addition, the 6630 has Bluetooth, tri-band GSM, Symbian Series 60 operating system and all the usual features that you'd  expect from this class of handset.

We think that the Nokia 6630 is something the market has been crying out for - a sensible, capable Nokia 3G phone - although you'll have to wait until the end of 2004 to get your hands on one at a price of about €500/£320/$580 without a contract.

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